So I had quite the experiential whirlwind of a day yesterday, Wednesday Nov 22. Here’s a quick summary of the many intercultural experiences of the day:

* morning : My mom gets a spam email from “gospelnews”, with a document claiming to find references to Jesus in Hindu scriptures. She blows up in a fury and I am the only Christian around for her to vent to. Instead of debating theology with her, I acknowledge the disgusting wrongness of the email and empathize with her as she vents.

* afternoon : The doorman/concierge/handyman/janitor for the apartment building escorts me to a small dusty neighborhood salon, where I try to get a haircut and promptly enter into a theological conversation in Arabic with the right-wing street savvy Muslim barber, who reminds me a lot of my theologically intense friend Dan Gelok back in Texas. On the way back I get to talking with the doorman, who is from a rural village and illiterate, but a devout Muslim who follows the teachings of the imam at the local mosque.

* evening : We drive as a family to meet an Armenian dentist, who has become a family friend to my parents. While there, I am introduced to Hamid, an Egyptian man about my age who has become an ardent student of Indian meditation and yoga. We have a rambling conversation about yoga, meditation, the fluidity of eastern philosophies and the relative blind-fanaticism of adherents of the three main Abrahamic religions. We talk about, in particular, the difficulties of conversing about faith journeys with people who think the Koran or the Bible are the literal words of God with no room for interpretation. Hamid runs into this because he wants to teach Egyptians how to meditate and realize inner peace, but any mention of eastern thought gets him branded as a heretic or an infidel.

* night : My mom and Alexis and myself are playing cards when the doorman’s wife shows up to deliver something for my mother, who invites her to sit with us a while. We find out that the wife recognizes the game we are playing because she has seen the menfolk in her village play the same game, but refuses to join us because women in her village have never been allowed to play cards. She is also illiterate and cannot distinguish the 8 of diamonds from the 10 of diamonds unless she counts the symbols on the cards.

The day started out with a bang, as I walked into the living room in the morning to find my mom in a fury. She had gotten a broadcast email from some address called “gospelnews”, in which someone named “kumar” attached a Word document claiming to prove that the Hindu scriptures contain references to Jesus. This “kumar” wrote in the email: “Jesus in Samaveda! Knoe your real God.”

The Word document was fairly typical of “confrontational apologetics”, with several doctrinal strawman questions answered by out-of-context references from the Samaveda, one of the Vedas in the Hindu scriptures, with tenuous links to Christ.

The document was peppered throughout with exhortations to Hindus to be saved through Jesus Christ, the only way to salvation.

My mom’s reaction to this was something I wish I could have captured on video to show evangelical Christians just how disastrous their “gospel” methods are.

She felt violated, insulted, offended, and severely angered by this email. What made it worse was that this was a spam email - she did not know who sent this, nor how they got her email address. That being the case, she didn’t have any way of responding to the person who sent the email. It was a classic email “flame war” method - lob an email out into the ether without any dialogue or personal conversation.

The sad thing is - that is exactly what I would have thought of as a great idea a couple of years ago. And I know, personally, several evangelical Christians who would send out such emails to random email addresses. All while thinking, quite devoutly, that they are spreading the gospel.

After all, they would claim, the gospel has the power to save, does it not, and people need to hear/read it, do they not, in order to be saved? So long as some people “get saved” through such a broadcast email/radio/TV/blog, what does it matter if many feel offended and violated?

These evangelical Christians would take the angle that my mom’s anger is proof that the gospel faces opposition in many parts of the world, and they would experience the anger simply as persecution for the gospel’s sake.

Meanwhile, back in Cairo, my response was to stay silent and let my mom vent, and to humbly acknowledge that the email was wrong, that it was insulting and offensive and arrogant, and, primarily, wrong.

In doing so, I learned quite a lot. My mom shared many stories of her own personal experiences with Christians who were insultingly condescending of Hindus and who were pridefully arrogant of the supremacy of their own faith. She also launched several provocative verbal counter-attacks, emotionally charged as she was, but I let them slide without trying to respond with arguments.

The call of Jesus at the time was for love and humility, not for a spirited “defense of the Christian faith,” so I took it and loved my mom by being an audience for her vented emotions.

And it was good.

I felt like I was doing penance for my own days as an arrogant evangelical who thought the rest of the world was wrong and that it was my God-given duty to convince the fools of the errors of their ways.

Now, I experienced the meekness and humility of Jesus in a new way, and swallowed my pride and my need to be right in turn to simply embrace the presence of Jesus, whose name is suffering as a result of the idiotic actions of his alleged followers.

Later, as my mom’s anger and blood pressure subsided, we moved on to better topics that got my mom smiling again. I was emotionally shaken by the experience, but in retrospect it was the healthiest way for my mom to vent, since she would have only gotten more stressed and angry if I had tried to take on a similarly defensive stance about Christianity or if I had tried to counter-attack.

I mused on why I felt the need to defend or attack anything to begin with. Certainly, my mom’s provocative statements automatically put one on the defensive, but should I really let my buttons be pushed so easily? And why do I have such buttons in the first place? If I keep harping about a big God, why can’t I trust my big God to do the worrying about His glory and why do I have to feel the need to defend the actions of adherents of any particular creed or culture?

Meanwhile, my mom’s reaction to the email bears lessons of its own. Her provocation was triggered not just by the email but by her own many experiences with Christians as well, many of which have served to put her on the defensive anytime a smirking Christian enters the figurative room. The email itself was patently indefensible - I do not believe it contained even a shred of the gospel, all it contained were out-of-context quotes, awkward leaps of faulty logic, sprinklings of Bible verses, and shrill exhortations to be “saved” as if salvation were the finish-line goal of life. Even if it did contain truth, though, people do not respond to packaged truth on the basis of just one package in isolation, as if it were a product in a box bought off a supermarket shelf - people are more complex than that and receive truth within the context of a much wider range of experiences. The truth alone does not matter - the package and the bearer also play a role, but the biggest role is the relationship between the persons involved in the process. This is why lies and gossip spread by word of mouth so much quicker than official pronouncements of truth.

Even thinking about truth packaged in an email as if it were a product makes me sick. This is the kind of misguided notion, that the gospel can be packaged and communicated impersonally, that marks Christians worldwide.

So, a lesson learned in grace then - it is easy to talk about grace, it is harder to exercise grace and quietly embrace the imperfections of my neighbor, especially when said imperfections are triggered explosively by the imperfections of another who thinks he is acting in the righteous name of God.

As Ian points out below, a lesson straight from James indeed.